Kepler (19 page)

These, then, are some of my present concerns. I shall have much to say of them in the future. For now, my lady wife desires that the great astronomer issue forth into the town to purchase a fat goose.

Fröhliche Weihnachten!
Johannes Kepler

Loretoplatz Hradcany Hill Prague Easter Day 1605

David Fabricius: in Friesland

As I have delayed long in my promise of a further letter, so it is right all the same that I should sit down now, on this festival of redemption, to tell you of my triumph. As, my dear Fabricius, what a foolish bird I had been! All along the solution to the mystery of the Mars orbit was in my hands, had I but looked at things correctly. Four long years had elapsed, from the time I acknowledged defeat because of that error of 8 minutes of arc, to my coming back on the problem again. In the meantime, to be sure, I had gained much skill in geometry, and had invented many new mathematical methods which were to prove invaluable in the renewed Martian campaign. The final assault took two, nearly three more years. Had my circumstances been better, perhaps I would have done it more quickly, but I was ill with an infection of the gall, and busy with the Nova of 1604, and the birth of a son. Still, the real cause of the delay was my own foolishness amp; shortness of sight. It pains me to admit, that even when I had solved the problem,
I did not recognise the solution for what it was.
Thus we do progress, my dear Doctor, blunderingly, in a dream, like wise but undeveloped children!

I began again by trying once more to attribute a
circular
orbit to Mars. I failed. The conclusion was, simply, that the planet's path curves inwards on both sides, and outwards again at opposite ends. This
oval
figure, I readily admit, terrified me. It went against that dogma of circular motion, to which astronomers have held since the first beginnings of our science. Yet the evidence which I had marshalled was not to be denied. And what held for Mars, would, I knew, hold also for the rest of the planets, including our own. The prospect was appalling. Who was I, that I should contemplate recasting the world? And the labour! True, I had cleared the stables of epicycles amp; retrograde motions and all the rest of it, and now was left with only a single cartful of dung, i.e. this oval-but what a stink it gave off! And now I must put myself between the shafts, and draw out by myself that noisome load!

After some preliminary work, I arrived at the notion that the oval was an egg shape. Certainly, this conclusion involved some geometrical sleight of hand, but I could not think of any other means of imposing an oval orbit on the planets. It all seemed to me wonderfully plausible. To find the area of this doubtful egg, I computed 180 sun-Mars distances, and added them together. This operation I repeated 40 times. And still I failed. Next, I decided that the true orbit must be somewhere between the egg shape amp; the circular, just as if it were a perfect ellipse. By this time, of course, I was growing frantic, and grasping at any straw.

And then a strange amp; wonderful thing occurred. The two sickle shapes, or moonlets, lying between the flattened sides of the oval and the ideal circular orbit, had a width at their thickest points amounting to 0.00429 of the radius of the circle. This value was oddly familiar (I cannot say why: was it a premonition glimpsed in some forgotten dream?). Now I became interested in the angle formed between the position of Mars, the sun, and the centre of the orbit, the secant of which, to my astonishment, I discovered to be 1.00429. The reappearance of this value-. 00429-showed me at once that there is a fixed relation between that angle, and the distance to the sun, which will hold good for all points on the planet's path. At last, then, I had a means of computing the Martian orbit, by using this fixed ratio.

You think that was the end of it? There is a final act to this comedy. Having tried to construct the orbit by using the equation I had just discovered, I made an error in geometry, and failed again. In despair, I threw out the formula, in order to try a new hypothesis, namely, that the orbit might be an ellipse. When I had constructed such a figure, by means of geometry, I saw of course that the two methods produced the same result, and that my equations was, in fact,
the mathematical expression of an ellipse.
Imagine, Doctor, my amazement, joy amp; embarrassment. I had been staring at the solution, without recognising it! Now I was able to express the thing as a law, simple, elegant, and true:
The planets move in ellipses with the sun at one focus.
God is great, and I am his servant; as I am also,

your humble friend, Johannes Kepler

Already the light was failing when he arrived in Regens-burg at last. A fine rain drifted slantwise through the November dusk, settling in a silver fur on his cloak, his breeches, the nag's lank mane. He crossed the Steinerne Brücke over the sullen surge of the Danube. Dim figures, faceless and intent, passed him by in the streets. There was an ominous hum in his ears, and his hands, clutching the greasy reins, trembled. He told himself it was fatigue and hunger: he could not afford to be ill, not now. He had come to accost the Emperor, to demand a settlement of what he was owed.

The lamps were lit in Hillebrand Billig's house. From a way off he spied the yellow windows and the taverner and his wife within. It was an image out of a dream, that light shining through the brown gloom and the rain, and folk attending his coming. The old horse clattered to a stop, coughing. Hillebrand Billig peered at him from the doorway. "Why, sir, we did not expect you until the morrow. "

Always the same, too late or too early. He was not sure what day of the week it was.

"Well, " stamping his numbed feet, tears in his eyes from the cold, "here I am!"

He was put to dry by the fire in the kitchen, with a platter of ham and beans and a pint-pot of punch, and a cushion for his seething piles. An elderly dog snoozed at his feet, gasping and growling in its sleep. Billig fussed around him, a large leather-clad man with a black beard. At the stove Frau Billig stood paralysed by shyness, smiling helplessly upon her saucepans. Kepler no longer remembered how or when he had come to know the couple. They seemed to have been always there, like parents. He smiled vacantly into the fire. The Billigs were twenty years younger than he. Next year would be his sixtieth.

"I am bound for Linz," he said. He had just remembered that. There was interest on some Austrian bonds to be collected.

"But you'll bide with us a while?" said Hillebrand Billig, and, with ponderous roguishness: "The rate here, you know, heh, is
cheap. "
It was his only joke. He never tired of it. "Is that not so, Anna?"

"O yes," Frau Billig managed, "you will be very welcome, Herr Doctor."

"Thank you," Kepler murmured. "I must, yes, spend a few days here. I have to see the Emperor, he owes me moneys."

The Billigs were impressed.

"His majesty will soon be returning to Prague," said Hillebrand Billig, who prided himself on knowing about these matters. "The congress has finished its business, I hear."

"But I will catch him, all the same. Of course, as to whether he will be prepared to settle his account with me, that is another question. " His majesty had larger matters on his mind than the imperial mathematician's unpaid salary. Kepler sat upright suddenly, slopping his punch. The saddlebags! He rose, making for the door. "Where is my horse, what has become of my horse?" Billig had sent it to the stables. "But my bags, my my… my bags!"

"The boy will bring them. "

"O." Kepler, moaning, turned this way and that. All of his papers were in those satchels, including a stamped and sealed imperial order for the payment of 4,000 florins from the crown's debt to him. The merest tip of something unspeakable was shown him briefly with a grin and then whisked away. Aghast, he sat down again, slowly. "What?"

Hillebrand Billig leaned down to him, mouthing elaborately. "I say, I will go out myself and bring them in, your bags, yes?"

"Ah."

"Are you unwell, Doctor?"

"No no… thank you."

He was trembling. He remembered out of his childhood a recurring dream, in which a series of the most terrible tortures and catastrophes was unfolded leisurely before him, while someone whom he could not see looked on, watching his reactions with amusement and an almost friendly attention. Just now that vision, whatever to call it, had been like that, the same slick flourish and the sense of muffled gloating. That was more, surely, than simply fear for his possessions? He shivered. "Eh?" Frau Billig had spoken. "Beg pardon, ma'am?"

"Your family," she said, louder, smiling nervously and plucking at her apron; "Frau Kepler, and the children?"

"O, they are very well, very well. Yes." A faint spasm, almost a pain, passed through him. It took him a moment to identify it. Guilt! As if by now he were not familiar with
that.
"We have lately had a wedding, you know. "

Hillebrand Billig returned then, with rain in his beard, and set down the saddlebags on the hearth.

"Ah, good," Kepler mumbled, "very kind." He put up his feet on the bags, offering his toes to the blaze: let the chilblains suffer a little too, and serve them right. "Yes, a wedding. Our dear Regina has gone from us. " He looked up into the Billigs' puzzled silence. "But what am I saying? I mean of course
Susan. " He
coughed, raking up an oyster. His head hummed. "The match was made in heaven, when Venus whispered in the ear of my young assistant, Jakob Bartsch, a stargazer also, and a doctor of medicine." And when the goddess had become discouraged, seeing what a timid specimen was this Adonis, Kepler himself had taken up her task. Pangs of guilt then, too. Such bullying! He wondered if he had done right. There was much of her mother in that girl. Poor Bartsch. "Young Ludwig, my eldest boy, also is going for medicine." He paused. "And neither have I been idle: another little one, last April, a girl," leering sheepishly at the fire. Frau Billig rattled the pots on the stove: she disapproved of his young wife. So had Regina.
It would be a marriage,
she had written to him,
if my Herr Father had no child.
A curious way of putting it. He had read much into that letter, too much. Foolish and sinful dreams. She was only hinting again about that damned inheritance. And he had replied that she might mind her own business, that he would marry when, and whom, he liked. But ah, Regina, what I could not say was that she reminded me of you.

Three times the name Susanna had occurred in his life, two daughters, one dead in infancy, one married now, and then at last a wife. Someone had been trying to tell him something. Whoever it was, was right. He had chosen her out of eleven candidates. Eleven! The comedy of it struck him only afterwards. He could no longer remember them all. There had been the widow Pauritsch of Kunstadt, who had tried to use his motherless children in plying her case, and that mother and daughter, each one eager to sell him the other, and fat Maria with her curls, the Helmhard woman who was built like an athlete, and that titled one, what was her name, a very Gorgon: all with advantages, their houses, their rich fathers, and he had chosen a penniless orphan, Susanna Reuttinger of Eferding, despite universal opposition. Even her guardian, the Baroness von Star-hemberg, had considered her too lowly a match for him.

She was twenty-four the first time he met her, at the Star-hembergs' house in Linz: a tall, slightly ungainly and yet handsome girl, with fine eyes. Her silence unnerved him. She spoke hardly a word that first day. He had thought she would laugh at him, a fussy middle-aged little man with weak sight, his beard already streaked with grey. Instead she attended him with a kind of tender intensity, leaning down to him her solemn grey eyes and downturned mouth. It was not that she much resembled Regina, but there was something, an air of ordered self-containment, and he was pierced. She was a cabinetmaker's daughter, like you, like you.

"Anna Maria we have called the baby," he said, and Anna Billig consented to smile. "A pretty name, I think."

Seven children Susanna had borne him. The first three had died in infancy. He wondered then if he had married another Barbara Müller née Müller. She saw him think it, watching him with that sad, apprehensive gaze. Yet he suspected, and was filled with wonder at the notion, that she was not hurt by it, but only concerned for him and
his
loss, his sense of betrayal.

She asked so little! She had brought him happiness. And now he had abandoned her. "Yes," he said, "a pretty name."

He closed his eyes. Waves of wind washed against the house, and beyond the noise of the rain he fancied he could hear the river. The fire warmed him. Trapped gas piped a tiny tune deep in his gut. This brute comfort made him think again of his childhood. Why? There had been precious few log fires and mugs of punch in old Sebaldus's house. But he carried within him a vision of lost peace and order, a sphere of harmony which had never been, yet to which the idea of childhood seemed an approximation. He belched, and laughed silently at the spectacle of himself, a sodden old dolt dozing in his boots, maundering over the lost years. He should fall asleep, with blubber mouth agape and dribbling, that would complete the picture. But that other roaring fire up his backside kept him awake. The dog yelped, dreaming of rats.

"Well, Billig, you tell me the electoral congress is finished its business?"

"Aye, it has. The princes have left already." "And about time for them to finish, they have had six months at it. Has the young rake's succession been assured?" "They do say so, Doctor. "

"I must be quick then, eh, if I am to have satisfaction of his father?"

The Billigs laughed with him, but weakly. His heartiness, he saw, did not fool them. They were itching to know the real reason why he had fled home and family to come on this lunatic venture. He would have liked to know, himself. Satisfaction, was that what he was after? The promise of 4,000 florins was still in his bag, with the seal unbroken. This time most likely he would receive another, equally useless piece of parchment to keep it company. Three emperors he had known, poor Rudolph, the usurper Matthias his brother, and now the wheel of his misfortune had come full circle and his old enemy Ferdinand of Styria, scourge of the Lutherans, wore the crown. Kepler would never have gone near him, were it not for that unsettled debt. It was ten months to the day since he had last accosted him.

Old it had been that morning, the sky like a bruised gland and a taste of metal in the air, and everything holding its breath under an astonishment of fallen snow. Soiled white boulders of ice lolled on the river. In the dark before dawn he had lain awake, listening in fright to the floes breaking before the bow, the squeaking and the groans and the sudden flurries of cracks like distant musket-fire. They docked at first light. The quayside was deserted save for a mongrel with a swollen belly chasing the slithering hawser. The bargemaster scowled at Kepler, his oniony breath defeating even the stink seeping up from the cargo of pelts in the hold. " Prague," he said, with a contemptuous wave, as if he had that moment manufactured the silent city rising behind him in the freezing mist. Kepler had haggled over the fare.

He had come from Ulm with the first printed copies of the
Tabulae Rudolphinae.
On the way that time also he had paused at Regensburg, where Susanna was lodging at the Billigs'. It was Christmas, and he had not seen her and the children for almost a year, yet he could not be idle. The Jesuits at Dillengen had shown him letters from their priests in China, asking for news of the latest astronomical discoveries, and now he set himself at once to composing a little treatise for the missionaries' use. The children hardly remembered him. He would stop, feeling their eyes on his back as he worked, but when he turned they would scurry off, whispering in alarrr, to the safety of Anna Billig's kitchen.

He had wanted to continue on again alone, but Susanna would not have it. She was not impressed by his talk of snowstorms, the frozen river. Her vehemence startled him. "I do not care if you are
walking
to Prague: we shall walk with you. "

"But…"

"But
no, "
she said, and again, more softly this time: "But no, Kepler dear," and smiled. She was thinking, he supposed, that it was not good for him to be so much alone.

"How kind you are, " he mumbled, "how kind. " Always he believed without question that others were better than he, more thoughtful, more honourable, a state of affairs for which the standing apology that was his life could not make up. His love for Susanna was a kind of inarticulate anguish choking his heart, yet it was
not enough,
not enough, like everything else that he did and was. Eyes awash, he took her hands in his, and, not trusting himself to speak further, nodded his soggy gratitude.

They lodged in Prague at The Whale by the bridge. The children were too cold to cry. The wharfinger's men rolled his precious barrel of books up from the quay, through the snow and the filth. Fortunately he had packed it with wadding and lined the staves with oilskin. The
Tables
were a handsome folio volume. Twenty years, on and off, he had devoted to that work! It contained the most of him, he knew, though not the best. His finest flights were in the
World Harmony
and the
Astronomia nova,
even the
Mysterium,
his first. He knew he had wasted too much time on the
Tables.
A year, two at the most, would have done it, when the Dane was dead and he had the observations, if he had concentrated. It might have made his fortune. Now, with everybody too busy at each other's throats to bother with such works, he would be lucky to recoup the cost of printing. Some there were who were interested still- but what did he care for converting the Chinee, and to popery at that? Sailors, though, would bless his name, explorers and adventurers. He had always liked the notion of those hardy seafarers poring over the charts and diagrams of the
Tabulae,
their piercing eyes scanning the bleached pages. It was they, not the astronomers, who made his books live. And for a moment his mind would range out over immensities, feel the blast of sun and salt wind, hear the gales howl in the rigging: he, who had not ever even seen the ocean!

He was not prepared for Prague, the new spirit that seemed abroad in the city. The court had returned from its Viennese seat for the coronation of Ferdinand's son as King of Bohemia; at first Kepler was charmed, imagining that the age of Rudolph had returned with it. He had been afraid, coming here, and not only of the ice on the river. The war was going well for the Catholic parties, and Kepler remembered how, thirty years before, Ferdinand had hounded the Protestant heretics out of Styria. At the palace everything was bustle and an almost gay confusion, where he had expected stillness and stealth. And the clothes! The yellow capes and scarlet stockings, the brocades and the frogging and the purple ribbons; he had never seen such stuffs, even in Rudolph's time. He might have been among a spawn of Frenchmen. But it was in the clothes that he quickly saw how wrong he had been. There was no new spirit, it was all show, a frantic paying of homage not to greatness but to mere might. These reds and purples were the bloody badge of the counter-reformation. And Ferdinand had not changed at all.